Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Obama's beliefs

I can't really criticize Obama for not sticking to his beliefs. After 2010, you would think that he would have changed his belief that cutting "entitlements" was a good political idea. The GOP ran to the left of Obama in that election, pointing to the cuts he was proposing to Medicaid to rally the troops. Well, Obama is doing it again, proposing a transparent cut in Social security at a time when social security should actually be raised quite a bit. So, we at least have evidence of a core belief, which Obama shared with freedom loving Thatcher and Reagan: government entitlements are the problem. I like how this comes on the heels of the inauguration speech where O. made heavy weather with inequality as a bad thing. He's apparently changed his mind, since his proposals will make it visibly worse. I actually thought the Dems had learned something in 2012, but they didnt. Instead, the same feckless turn to the right is going to be their theme in 2014. Giving the GOP an opportunity to rescue Social Security from the Dems. It is funny, this game of piggy in the middle played by the two plutocratic parties in the age of the mock democracy.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.